The iPhone X has been out for about eight months now, so it’s time to look back on what a mistake it was to buy one.
Writing for the very fine people and editors and plague monkeys at Business Insider, Matt Weinberger is positively meh on the iPhone X.
“I bought a $999 iPhone X eight months ago—and I kind of regret it.” (Tip o’ the antlers to David, Nick and Damien.)
iPhone X customer satisfaction is 97 percent, but it’s a little unclear where Weinberger lands.
I mean, it’s fine. You know? It’s fine.
[Survey-taker, hovering pencil over clipboard] “Uh, well, sir, it’s either ‘Very satisfied,’ ‘Satisfied,’ ‘Not satisfied,’ ‘Very dissatisfied,’ or ‘Actually, I’m a competitor and just bought it so we could get a precise measurement of the notch for our knock-off.’”
It’s just that, well, for the $999 I paid for it, I was expecting… more, somehow.
The Macalope gets it. “Ultimately, my life remained as dull and dissatisfying as it was before I bought this device” is a frequent lament these days. This is partly why the horny one owns an iPhone SE.
Weinberger then launches into Business Insider’s patented “Henry Blodget reviews flying economy class”-style (actual quote from that piece: “[The meal] came with Laughing Cow cheese and crackers. Hard to complain about that.”) to talk about the iPhone X. (Technically it’s not patented, it’s just that no one else likes using it because it’s so trite.)
Okay, let’s start with the good stuff about the $999 iPhone X to prove I’m not a total hater.
Matt, please. We know you’re not a total hater. You’re a total meh-er. We are ready for your bland admonishments.
Weinberger complains that Face ID only works 90 or 95 percent of the time. Presumably this pales in comparison to the imagined 100 percent of the time that Touch ID works. As someone with a Touch ID iPhone, the Macalope can assure you that it probably works 95 percent of the time as well.
Another problem is that everyone wants bezel-less phones but no one wants to pay the bezel-less price.
Because there’s no home button, Apple introduced new navigation gestures. …
…apps like Pokémon Go sometimes ask you to swipe around the bottom. On a traditional iPhone, no problem. On an iPhone X, you could close the app accidentally.
EVERYTHING WORKED FINE BEFORE AND NOW IT’S ALL BROKEN. The Macalope finds it hard to believe that Weinberger never accidentally triggered Control Center when playing a game that required swipes around the bottom of the screen on a pre-X iPhone.
Ultimately, you can’t begrudge someone a little buyer’s remorse after shelling out $999 for a smartphone. Weinberger wonders if he wouldn’t have been better off buying an iPhone 8 and pocketing the change and worries about rumors that Apple is moving to a lineup that’s largely iPhone X-inspired. But the whole point of doing that is moving features down the price scale, so not everyone has to pay $999 to get them. If you can get the features for less, doesn’t that lessen the remorse?
The answer, it turns out, is “Meh.”